Haha

Saw this on facebook and had to share. Got a real post in the works but not quite finalized yet.. it’s been a crazy couple weeks to get caught up on!

My daughters will be forced to take shop class.

Stress (Noun): The mental state caused by having too many bunnies in too small a space.

They’re fine in the hutch with Mom while they’re still tiny and cute like these little two week olds.  But the litters of baby bunnies hit 4 weeks, and then 5, and my guilt meter at having them all crammed inside there was exploding off the top of the Richter scale.  They needed a new enclosure.  There were too many babies this time to all fit inside the one pen we used with the last litter.  With Alice gone it was up to me to build a duplicate pen so that each set of babies could have its own 6 by 6 foot space to run around in and eat grass.  I moved Snuggles and her nine(!!) offspring out to the one run, and set about building a second for Margot and her six.

In this first picture, you see the state of affairs as I gathered my supplies and examined my model to copy.   I used the table saw in the barn to cut the boards to (approximate) length.

This is how far I got during my first attempt at building:

You’ll notice that not much has changed in comparison with the first picture.  This took me some serious time, and my results were minimal: I got about three 2×4′s shakily screwed together before the drill ran out of batteries and I ran out of long-enough, unstripped screws.  I learned a couple things, though, through trial and error.

A few days later, stress level mounting, I resolved to devote another evening toward bunny construction.  We had gotten firewood delivered to the yurt that day, so after my 9-hour workday I went home to help Jen (my new roomie) move a cord and a half of split logs.   Somehow, after all that, through sheer force of will I decided to continue on in my Carhartts and do the building that I’d planned on instead of changing into jammies and going immediately to sleep.  I brought two drills plus extra batteries, a full set of the kind of bits that drill holes, a magentized-extendo-Phillips-head screwdriver drill bit thingy, a couple clamps, more screws, and the staple gun from the barn out to the yurt.  I resolved to get the bunny house done tonight.  I had my headlamp at the ready.

It was so much easier with my little bit of extra preparedness.  I kept two different bits in the two drills so that I could alternately make holes and sink screws without switching the bits all the damn time.  I used the clamps to hold things up since I do only have two hands, and propping things on my head wasn’t working.  The pieces felt like they were fitting together more solidly and using the drill felt a bit more natural.  It still took time though…. and with it being September 21st and all, it got dark out by the time I even reached this point:

And then I went to put the chicken wire around the outside and discovered that the staple gun was out of staples. But oh well.  I cut the wire to size and made all the other finishing touches.  Sinking screws through the sheet metal roof and attaching the hinged top door were both extremely gratifying tasks.  It felt like building with Legos or K’Nex like we did when we were kids, the way the pieces and attachments just fit together effortlessly.  I was having fun and thinking about future construction projects!

I went to bed.  Then I woke up to this:

Looking out at that breathtaking sunrise gave me a feeling of happiness in my heart.  Similar to the feeling I get when I look out at this:

The completed rabbit enclosure, with Margie and her babies (they’re teenagers at this point, really…) enjoying a newfound ability to stretch and scamper around and eat grass and veggies.

I wouldn’t want to build bridges over the Grand Canyon or anything whose structural integrity was important to the well-being of myself or others.  But if I need to build an animal enclosure or a greenhouse or a wash table on my future farm, I feel like I am on the way to being able to do so competently.   I am learning on the fly.  But I still wish I had seen the value in that woodshop class back in middle school.

Where did the time go? A little September update.

Ummm, so yeah!  How has it been over a month since I last wrote?  I fell off the blog train pretty hard there during August and September.  Not too surprising, I suppose, as they are the busiest months on the farm with too much to do overriding blog writing.  But also disappointing, since these are the busiest months on the farm with every day jam-packed with interesting things to write about.

August was a blur of new vegetables coming into harvest.  Lemon and pickling cucumbers, heirloom and cherry tomatoes, dragon’s tongue beans, zucchini, zucchini, zucchini, and finally potatoes, apples, and onions got added to the list of things that were filling out our CSA boxes and market stall every week.  The work days got longer and the days off got filled with more and more summertime activities.  Swimming in the river was the perfect end to a hot August day’s work.

And then — without warning it seemed — it was time.  Time for Alice to leave for Michigan.  Mid-August saw a flurry of going-away events for Miss VanderHaak.  She had spent two years on the farm and had made friends with pretty much everyone around.  We had a big old goodbye party a.k.a. HOOTENANNY for her at the yurt.  The preceding day we had harvested our batch of rabbits so we cooked some really special braised rabbit for our guests to share that night.

The same week that Alice left the farm, I was also gone on vacation — home in Michigan for my sister’s wedding.  When I got back to the farm, it was amazing how clearly a transition had happened.  It was still hot out, but I could feel that we were over the hump of summer.  I arrived home to an empty yurt, the river level low and sluggish, the greenhouse empty of new plant starts, and the beginning of the Fall Feeling in the air.

I love autumn; it’s my birthday season, and the crisp chill always stirs a good feeling of excitement in my bones.  But it’s also a sad time of year in farming when the realization hits that the days are getting shorter, no more new successions of lettuce are going in, and the bountiful summer crops that it seems like we just started harvesting are already starting on their decline.  You begin to be able to feel winter coming down the pike.  And although that slow season is a relief from the summer’s hard physical labor, it’s still not really something to look forward to.

It’s a time of reflection, for sure.  A time to think about how my life has changed and what I’ve learned this year.  I have had some growing pains these last few weeks since Alice’s departure, having to take care of the yurt systems by myself.  A strange convergence happened the other day where both propane tanks ran empty and the solar-charged batteries straight-up DIED, leaving me without lights or running water, and no little Alice to solve the problems for me   I grumbled about it a bit, but really, it’s pretty great that now I know I can fix these things.  I’ve learned how to drive the tractor, fill the tanks, recharge the batteries, manage the composting toilet, and keep the fire going.  All these pieces that seemed foreign and daunting at first are now a manageable, if slightly time-consuming, part of daily life.

Same with the rabbits.  The bunnies were Alice and my project together — actually it was really her doing in the beginning: she drove the procurement of two bred does and a hutch for them to live in.  When the first kits were born, she was the one to reach in the nests and make sure they were all alive; she was the one that built the larger pen where the babies would grow up.  Our harvest (a prettier word for slaughter) of these buns was a powerful, memorable experience for the two of us.  I had decided to raise a second round of babies by myself after Alice moved, so new litters were born to the mamas just days before we harvested the three-month-olds.  Now I’m a single bunny parent, doing the feeding and cleaning and building by myself that Alice and I had previously shared.  It’s the same for me as with driving the tractor — back in April I had no idea how to do these things and, thinking back on it now, I remember that I seriously felt scared by the prospect of taking them on.  I guess I’ll just have to accept as fact that I get nervous about trying new things and continue trying new things anyway, even without Alice around to give me that extra shove

My parents were just here for a week-long visit, and having them and my aunts and uncle out to the farm & yurt was GREAT and a good reminder for me that this lifestyle I’m getting used to is not forever.  It was fun to show everyone around and share a bit of the farm life with them.  But having them here and watching their impressed reactions to me driving the tractor and taking care of the bunnies reminded me that my sense of normalcy has shifted.  Soon, so very soon as time seems to be flying these days, I won’t be falling asleep to the sound of bullfrogs in an off-the-grid yurt looking out over a squash field and the Cascade mountains.  I won’t be able to just pop a squat and pee in the wide-open privacy of my front yard.  On the other hand, I won’t have to keep a fire going all night or haul water out to my abode on a tractor once a month, either.  Pros and cons.

It’s been a great several weeks since I last wrote, and I have been taking pictures which I will post to flickr as soon as I find time in life to do so.  I love my life here farming — it hits me forcibly quite frequently how rich the life is and how lucky I am to have discovered it.  I may not always show it, or find time to write about it, but almost every day I have these moments of joy and gratitude where I feel I am in the right place doing the right things and that I couldn’t be any happier with life than I am at this moment.

The end!  Hopefully I will write again sooner than a month and a half from now

~ B

M.F.K. Fisher – A book report.

It’s been a few years since my last book report.  Probably it was 7th grade or so?  Maybe Tom Sawyer or To Kill a Mockingbird?  But I can remember the instructions on how to compose a good literary analysis.  Compare/contrast, use applicable quotations, cite external sources, consider the author’s style and always, ALWAYS have good intro and concluding paragraphs.

The joy of writing a book report that doesn’t have to be turned in to a demanding 7th grade English teacher is that I can bend the rules, use emoticons, refer to the author by her first name (or initials), and write more about my own life than actually analyze the book   But I will cite my sources just to be properly thorough about the whole thing.  So here goes: Becky Warner on M.F.K. Fisher’s How to Cook a Wolf.

I honestly don’t find time for a whole lot of reading these days.  But when your dad sends you a 750-page volume in the mail, he probably paid enough in postage that it would behoove you to actually read it   Just kidding, but actually, I was so pleased that my dad took the time to send me the copy of M.F.K. Fisher’s The Art of Eating that I received for my high school graduation.  I definitely don’t remember getting this book as a gift — 17 year old Becky probably thought “what the crap would anyone think I wanted this book for?  I want money and a hot pot for my dorm room!”  But my dad’s friend Mark had remarkable foresight, or maybe he is just a foodie, but either way 28 year old Becky finds M.F.K’s writing to be delightful, thought-provoking, and spot-on to my current revelations about food.

Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, according to Wikipedia^[1], wrote about food “from many aspects: preparation, natural history, culture, and philosophy.”  The Art of Eating is a compendium of five of her works.  So far I have read How to Cook a Wolf, and found it to be so exciting that I can’t wait to get on to the next four.  So many times during my reading I found myself saying “yes!” or “M.F.K., you’re so right!”

How to Cook a Wolf was written in 1942, and delivers the author’s thoughts on how to cook and eat simply and without wasting during a time when “the wolf was at the door.”  What’s amazing to me is that much of what she talks about I would have considered “quaint” until recently, but now her recommendations match up quite well with the cooking and eating habits I’ve been forming.  Just goes to show that there’s nothing new under the sun; all the things that I thought were cool and new are just the pendulum swinging, thankfully, away from shitty 1970′s-1990′s food bastardization and back into sensible, wholesome “wartime” eating practices.

For example, there is the Stock Bag.  I had previously assumed that stock was a difficult and touchy thing to make, based on recipes I’d seen listing many ingredients and steps.  Martha Stewart, for example^[2], tells me to go out and buy *a chicken* and some celery and carrots and leeks which I will boil to make chicken stock.  She also tells me to buy two 48-oz cans of chicken broth for the liquid.  Why, if I may ask, am I using chicken broth to make chicken broth?  Canned broth is only going to make this stuff taste bad, and if I have good organic pastured chicken bones and plenty of vegetable matter, I don’t need to boil and then discard the chicken meat to make stock.

I learned about the stock bag from Noe, my roomate in Wallingford over the winter, from whom I have also learned rabbit butchering, how to start an urban farming co-op, and other handy homesteady type skills.  The stock bag is a plastic bag you keep in your freezer.  Every time you cook and you think of it, you add scraps to the bag instead of composting them: onion and carrot peels, lettuce leaves, herb stems, mushroom butt ends, anything you want except no brassicas.  If you’re a meat eater you also throw in bones from any lamb chops or chicken wings or ham hocks you happen to consume. Then when you want to make stock, you already have all the ingredients accumulated over time.  Thus you don’t have to go out to the grocery store and spend time and money buying ingredients to make stock.  They are just there waiting for you in the freezer.  You dump the stock bag’s contents into a steamer basket or top of a double boiler, add a bunch of water, and simmer it on the stove for a couple hours or all day.  Voila — stock.  Portion it out into jars or plastic containers and date them and freeze them.  I’ve been using stock instead of water for making rice and quinoa, beans, soup, stuffing, etc. and I’ve been loving the richer flavor it gives to all these things.

I thought Noe was pretty cool with the stock bag trick.  But it turns out, people were doing this in 1942.  M.F.K., perhaps not having a freezer, instructs housewives to “keep an old gin bottle in the icebox,” and add to it liquids from steaming vegetables, canned vegetable juices, and the like.  “Never throw away any vegetable or its leaves or juices unless they are bad; else count yourself a fool.  At the end you have a fine heady broth that will do wonders with any dish that calls for stock or even plain water.  If you keep your old gin bottle cold and reasonably on the move it need never spoil nor be anything but a present help in time of trouble, and a veritable treasure trove of vitamins and minerals that otherwise would have gone down the drain.” ^[3]  Ummm, Yup.  What she said.

I would say that M.F.K.’s main point in this book is that cooking simply and economically does not have to equate to eating boring or plain or monotonous meals.  She also is big on pointing out that “modern rounded meal-plans” and “adulterated foods” give the eater no pleasure when compared to the delight of eating fresh, whole, “honest” food.  The same point as Michael Pollan makes in his books, several decades later.  The same point that I have discovered on my own as I am lucky enough to live on farms with plenty of honest food rolling in. Fisher writes about foods and flavors in glowing prose that makes me hungry: “I want a salad of a dozen tiny vegetables: rosy potatoes in their tender skins, asparagus tips, pod-peas, beans two inches long and slender as thick hairs… I want them cooked, each alone to fresh perfection. I want them dressed, all together, in a discreet veil of oil and condiments.” [3] I couldn’t help but make such a salad after reading this description. Mine had zucchini sliced lengthwise and roasted caulifower florets, but the spirit was the same. Only on the farm (or in your own garden, or from your truly local non-touristy farmers market) can you get the ingredients to prepare this dish in the way that M.F.K. Fisher envisioned it. In 1942 people had victory gardens from which they could harvest tiny beans. What an entirely different experience from buying a bag of frozen green beans or even eating an iceberg salad made from bagged lettuce and “baby” “carrots”

Fisher’s writing is conversational and fun to read.  She pokes fun at stuck-up gastronomes and invites her readers to stop worrying and enjoy food and cooking.  She writes about using what you have on hand and creating your own inventions and combinations instead of following an overly-prescriptive recipe.  “Once the cupboard is stocked with things you like and a few you are not sure about, start combining.  Put this and that together in a pan, stir them, heat them, and serve them as they are.”^[3]   She includes a recipe for frittata, for example, remarkably similar to the one I wrote about last year although much simpler.  The recipe includes a few ingredients and a multitude of suggestions for substitutions.  You need eggs but then basically, just use whatever vegetables you have, maybe some herbs, maybe some cheese.  “And with a glass of wine and some honest-to-God bread it is a meal.  At the end of it you know that Fate cannot harm you, for you have Dined.”^[3]   My favorite line in the book, for sure. 

All her recipes are like this: more suggestions for methods of cooking and what types of flavors go well together than hard-and-fast instructions.  It gives the reader inspiration and then allows us to go out and experiment on our own.  It pleased me how many of her recipes are similar to things I’ve already been making with farm food.  I couldn’t believe it but she describes basically the exact same “weird farm breakfast” I wrote about with eggs cracked into boiling tomato soup and served over a bread slice.  She tops hers with a cup of beer, though, which I found intriguing especially for breakfast!  I tried her recipe for gingerbread (the old-fashioned kind that’s like a cake, not cookies) and it was delicious and very similar to the one I’d already had on my list of staple recipes.  She makes a rum sauce for hers, though, that I’m excited to try next time.  Rum sauce, beer over tomato soup?  Maybe old M.F.K. was a lush, is what we’re finding?

She has several recipes for rabbit, which is awesome as our bunnies’ date is approaching soon.  “Rabbit in Casserole” describes dredging the meat in flour and browning it, and then cooking for an hour in stock, wine, and herbs.  This is almost exactly the way I cooked our first rabbit, which I based a bit on Joy of Cooking and mostly on my own feel and taste.  Her second rabbit recipe is “with Sauerkraut and Bacon,” which you can rest assured I will be trying next.

In conclusion, (so you get the sense that I will be wrapping up with some pithy statements here),  I really enjoyed the book.  (Nope, too general.)  The book was found by all to be really enjoyable.  (Nope, nope, passive voice.)  M.F.K. Fisher’s How to Cook a Wolf is a valuable read for anyone interested in food and eating well.  (Ahh, there we go.  M.F.K. also uses a lot of parenthetical statements, which may be why I’m writing like this.)  It emphasizes a return to simple, vibrant ingredients and recipes which families were already slipping away from at the time of writing, and which is even more critical for us to read about now.  It definitely goes on my list of recommended readings for anyone who loves to eat, and to think about, food.

- B.W.

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Bibliographicallizzle:

[1]  M. F. K. Fisher. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved August 3, 2011, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._F._K._Fisher

[2]  Homemade Chicken Stock. (October 1999). In Martha Stewart Living. Retrieved August 3, 2011 from http://www.marthastewart.com/343921/homemade-chicken-stock

[3] Fisher, M. F.K.  (1942). How to Cook a Wolf.  New York: The Macmillan Company.

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:-)

 

 

A quick weekend visit with my dear ones from last year made for a happy heart.  It was good to check in with Betsey and Brian and the Bainbridge farms… some new and exciting things happening; much remains comfortingly unchanged.  I love these people more than I can say

 

Self-reliance

Caution: if you have a squeamish tendency, or you are my parent, you may not want to read this post.

Just kidding.  Kind of.  But here’s the tale of my last week and a half!

We are entering the upswing of the honest-to-goodness farm season.  The time when you realize that you were just being silly and naive when you thought things were busy before.  You ain’t seen busy until you’ve seen mid-July thru the end of August on a vegetable farm.  The vegetables are finally appearing out of nowhere… there are now MOUNTAINS of goods maturing daily that need to be harvested, cleaned, packed and sold.  (Actually, they are appearing out of somewhere — all those thousands of seeds we planted back in the spring).  We are having to work hard and work fast and work long.  This ramp-up time, I remember from last year as well, is not necessarily a smooth transition.  It hits with a rude awakening.  With the lack of sleep and increasing frantic-ness around the farm, semi-major and semi-minor catastrophes start piling up in all of our personal lives as well.  This serves to remind us that oh wait, were we trying to *have* personal lives in mid-season on the farm??  That would be a silly and impossible idea

So it was on a Thursday at the beginning of July, as I awoke at 5:45, that I first felt it catching up to me.  For the first time this season, I did not want to go to work.  Alice and I dragged ourselves in to the barn.  I could not wait for the weekend and a chance to catch up on sleep.  “I can’t believe Saturday is still two days away,” I was thinking to myself.  Farmer Adam greeted us with his usual enthusiasm.  “Good mornin’ rockin’ ladies!  So we had talked about everyone having Monday off for the 4th of July, and that is still cool, but we’re going to have to work Saturday instead to make sure we have everything prepped for Sunday and Tuesday.”  Sinking-heart feeling.  Add an extra workday before that needed weekend.  Gotta go to bed early tonight, I thought to myself.  I drove home after work, and, feeling lazy, I drove all the way up to the yurt, maneuvering my car around the ruts and mooshy spots in the road instead of parking in the usual place on dry ground a little ways away from the yurt.

Friday dawned much the same as Thursday.  I hit the snooze button a few times, raced through bunny chores and wolfed down breakfast, then sped off in the car with about two minutes until 7am start time.  Sped off, that is, for a few feet until my car came to a dead standstill as it buried its right front tire in a deep mucky rut and propped its front end on a solid ledge of dirt.  FUUUUUUUuuuudge.  I walked in to work, arriving about 7 minutes late.  “Sorry Adam!”  “It’s okay, Becky.  Why don’t you go out to field D and harvest cabbage.”

Nice!  A new crop to harvest for the first time this season.  I swung my harvest knife with gusto, chopping through the thick, meaty stalks of the plants.  With practice, a harvester can make a single swipe to sever the cabbage head at exactly the right point so that it can be plopped directly into your tote without spending any extra time peeling away loose leaves.  You want to refine this skill so you can be quick because you have 158 heads to harvest this morning, and plenty of other tasks to get to after that.

Phone call: “Hi Adam, I finished cabbage.”  “Cool, why don’t you walk over a few beds to where Yolanda and Flaviano are harvesting parsley and help them finish up and then all come in together.”  Okay, great.  Okay, I’ve never harvested parsley before.  Okay, I don’t speak Spanish all that well so I’m going to watch how these two are doing it.  Man, I’m really hungry for lunch.  Man, I’m really… THWACK.

OHHHHHHHHHHHH FUUUUUUUUUUDDDDDDGGGGGGEEEEEEEE.

Holy effing frick, I just CHOPPED MY HAND with my harvest knife instead of the FRICKING PARSLEY. Not good not good not good.  Owwwwwwwww there’s blood, thumb goes in mouth, drop knife, grab cell phone, call Adam.  In the truck next to Adam, I examine my left hand and see that I’ve sliced neatly THROUGH MY FINGERNAIL at the very base of the thumbnail.  “I’m glad you’re okay, it’s going to be okay” says Adam as he takes me in.  I’m crying, from hurt and shock and embarrassment but I can tell I’m not injured badly enough to go to a hospital, just badly enough to bandage it real well, get some hugs, stop crying, sit down for an early lunch and then get back to work on some tasks requiring only one functional thumb.

After work that day, I headed home with Alice and my bandaged hand.  I was fully expecting her to be able to help me pop my car out of the mud situation.  We’d gotten the Jeep stuck plenty of times and it always just needed that extra shoulder shove.  What I’d forgotten to factor in was the difference in clearance between my car and the Jeep.  No shoulder shove in the world was going to get that Mazda off its little perch.  God damn it all.  I got weepy again as I limped my sorry ass home with a broken thumb, an immobilized car, the prospect of another 7am workday, and PMS.  (Seriously, it’s true, I have up to two grumpy and/or sad days per month and they were happening right now).  Everything seemed totally out of control and the only appropriate reaction seemed to be tears.  It’s kind of funny for me to have these emotional moments every now and then and kind of watch myself acting all irrational, because most of the time I am the most overly rational and cerebral person you’ll ever meet.  I always feel like I have to be in control of everything in life, to the point where it is a bad thing.  It takes a kind of big curveball (like almost cutting my thumb off) to knock me off my pre-planning mode into reactionary mode.  It’s obviously not super great to get injured, but it’s good for me to be reminded that life can’t ever be pre-planned, life just happens, unexpected things happen, and that’s the beauty of it.  Sometimes something really great could happen.  Sometimes shit could happen that makes you cry.

I have noticed that my dad seems to worry about me losing life and limb in a farming accident.  He has pointed out the dangers of propane heaters, tractor tires exploding, stepping on rusty nails, etc.  See, Dad, I have been listening. There are indeed lots of things that can happen.  I never would have considered parsley harvest a dangerous task – things just happen when you don’t have your mind focused properly.  Mom and Dad, I was scared of what you would say when I told you I hurt myself farming.  I briefly considered not telling you about it but it turned out I needed a Mom call to help me when I was crying and upset   Thanks for that, and thanks for not suggesting that I could avoid future injury by pursuing a less dangerous computery type activity.

The next day was Saturday, which was finally my last day of work for the week.  Alice was gone to the city so I was going to be dependent on either myself or the farmer bosses for getting my car out.  I mentioned it in the morning, hesitant to ask them for a favor.  “Yeah, we can help…” said Adam, when I asked in the morning, but I saw the “I don’t get a lot of time to spend with my family and have you really tried everything you can to get it out yourself?” look in his eye.  So I left work in the evening without asking again and I took a shovel home with me.  Instead of feeling frustrated this time, I was feeling doggedly determined.  Hello car, hello mud.  I’m going to do whatever I have to do to separate the two of you from each other.  And that is how I ended up spending my Saturday evening on my hands and knees in smelly muck, getting bitten by mosquitoes, with my arm up to my shoulder underneath my car while I had it up on my jack (which the manual is very explicit about CAUTIONing you NOT to do… sorry again for telling you this M & D), digging with a shovel and a hand trowel and my HANDS to unstick my car from the Earth.

Pro tip: shingles, discovered in a pile back behind the yurt, make excellent grippy things for tires to grab onto instead of mud.  They work better than 2×6′s.  One go-round of jacking… shovelling… trowelling… shingles… unjacking… rocking it back and forth between Forward and Reverse… I could feel it getting somewhere but not quite popping out.  Another go-round of the same.  Rock it, rock it, ever so slightly more each time…. aaaaaaand….. UP and over and out.  Oh good god yes.  Thank youuuuu….. mission accomplished.  I drove in to the barn and did my laundry and then I went to bed.

In a weird sort of way, all these unexpected events piling on top of each other have reminded me that I can relax and let life happen.  Scary and sad and frustrating things happen, but I can depend on myself to be able to deal with whatever it is – on my own and with the help of the others around me.  I can do more on my own than I give myself credit for.   I don’t have to fall into my usual trap of “I haven’t done that before so I can’t do it.”   I’m the queen of over-preparation, hedging against any eventuality so that nothing will ever “go wrong.”  When things go a little bit wrong, I get stressed out about it easily.  But as it turns out, when things go a lot wrong,  I can handle it.

As if I needed another occurrence to drive this point home, here’s another story from just a couple of days after the prior events.

Backstory: As you may know, we are raising meat rabbits at the yurt.  They are 7 weeks old at this point, and have been moved out of their Mamas’ hutches and into a separate run where they can graze.  Alice’s dog Russ has been driven to distraction by our poor bunny-management skills.  As a hunting dog, he is simply following his instinct to track and chase these little critters that kept escaping the run that we had built with too-large a gauge of wire.  “We gotta fix it so they don’t keep getting out,” Alice and I kept saying to each other.  But the task got pushed to the back burner.  Each morning we’d get up, round up one or two little escapees, and put them back into the run.  It stressed me out that it kept happening, but I felt too busy to do anything about it.  So.  Cut to a Weds afternoon less than one week after all the above incidents.  Alice leaves Russ home with me while she’s out and about.  I’m alone near the yurt, doing some gardening, when I hear a frantic high-pitched sqealing.  Without knowing what’s going on, alarm signals start firing in my brain.  I drop my watering can and run to the yurt where Russ has chased, caught, and killed one of our rabbits.  The white bunny lies twitching on the ground, already dead with its neck broken but involuntarily spasming as Russ stands by looking aghast at what his instinct has caused him to do.  I, also instinctually, scream some nonsense at the dog that causes him to run into the yurt with his tail between his legs.  I then stand there over the small furry body, “Ohhhhh, nooooooo….” all I can think.  There’s no blood – it’s a clean kill.  I’ve seen a dead rabbit before when I helped my friend Noe process hers, and my mind clicks in.  I have to process it.  I have to.  This was an accident and I’m feeling awful and guilty about an early death being caused by my poor animal husbandry, but these rabbits were being raised for meat and now this animal is about to become meat, if I can remember what I learned from Noe.

It’s almost like I’m watching myself from an external standpoint.  My actions are not pre-thought-out but simply happening by necessity.  I pick up the bunny and leave it on the picnic table while I walk into the house and get a knife.  It’s not sharp so I get out Alice’s sharpening block and sharpen it – a skill I only learned recently. I walk outside and cut the rabbit’s head off to bleed it.  I can’t believe I’m doing this.  Standing on my front lawn butchering a tiny animal.  But at the same time I’m feeling focused, knowing what I need to do.  Next I need to hang it up.  I go inside and get my drill, a recent aqcuisition from my Gramp — little did he know what I’d need it for!  I put two screws at eye level into the back of the yurt platform and search around for twine to make the slipknots that will hold the rabbit’s hind legs.  No twine.  No string.  I find some red curling ribbon from my present-wrapping stash.  Festive.  I tie two slipknots.  I bring a five gallon bucket to catch the internal organs and a bucket of water for the hide and two ziploc bags — one for the carcass and one for the giblets.  I hang the rabbit and I skin it.  I remember where to make the cuts and how to pull the hide off.  I save the pelt.  I’m feeling intensely focused and quite calm.  I slit open the abdomen and pull out the insides, saving liver and kidneys.  The liver looks healthy compared to some at Noe’s which had spotty livers indicating parasitic infection.  I puncture the diaphragm, pull out and discard the lungs, pull out and save the heart.  It cleans up easily and cleanly – the last things are to remove the tail and hind legs.  The little carcass feels familiar in my hands as I clean it off with water and slide it into a baggie.  It’s smaller than the ones I did at Noe’s, but not all that much smaller.  There is meat here, and Alice and I are going to be able to eat it, turning this lemon into lemonade and following through on our original intention to raise these meat animals for our own consumption.

And we did.  Two days later we both had the morning off and we made wine-braised rabbit with onions and fennel and ate it together for lunch.  It was delicious, albeit a little earlier than planned.  It was a moment for us both to pause in our increasingly busy lives, look each other in the eyes, and appreciate the import of what we are doing: trying to do the best we can to eat *well*, in every sense.  The rest of the butchering is going to be easier to do because of this.  Having been surprised into doing it once without any forethought or preparation and having done it properly, I feel confident about doing it again in a planned fashion.

I’ll post the rabbit recipe later.  Right now it is 8:45 pm and I’m going to make the smart move of going to bed.  My thumb is to the point where I wear a Band-Aid for work and leave it uncovered the rest of the time.  It looks gnarly but it’s going to be allright.  My car is safely parked at the barn and I’ve been biking to and from the yurt which is nice anyway. We added a layer of chickenwire to the rabbit run and have had no escapees since. Today I had a great farm day in which I packed and delivered vegetables to three CSA drop-off sites, two restaurants, and a grocery store.  Tomorrow I’m going to wake up and harvest some more produce and tend to some more plants.  Or maybe not – you never know what’s going to happen until it happens, do you?  But you can bet it’s going to be another good day in the life.

Weird farm breakfast #463

Breakfast is a very important meal on the farm.  I’ve always been a breakfast eater (mostly Cheerios during my formative years ) but farm work burns a lot of calories, so these days a nice big protein and carb load in the morning is absolutely necessary to get from 7am start time until noon lunch.  We get pretty experimental and crazy with these breakfasts – gotta use whatever is in the fridge and pantry – and we sometimes come up with something surprisingly good!

My hot cereal breakfast is a very regular one.  I start with Bluebird Grains’ cereal mix, which we trade for at the farmers market.  I mix in some rolled oats for texture.  When I cook it I use about half water and half milk (raw & organic whole milk from Sea Breeze Farm which we trade for at the farmers market).  Then I put on sweet or savory toppings depending on the mood I wake up in.  I enjoy being able to check in with my stomach in the morning: is it a day for cheese, sauerkraut, and seaweed/sesame sprinkle on top? Or a day for peanut butter, raisins, and honey mixed in?

Savory breakfasts definitely have more sticking power than sweet.  I make eggs often, with the quickest and yummiest preparation being poached eggs on toast.  The other day I woke up craving something tomatoey, and we were also almost out of water in our tank at the yurt… so I poached my eggs using a jar of last summer’s canned tomato puree instead of water!  It was so simple and delicious and fulfilling, I wanted to write it down:

Eggy Tomato Bread

• 1/2 pint tomato juice/soup/puree (Butler Green Farm 2010)
• Couple sprigs of fresh rosemary or thyme (my porch)
• 2 eggs (trade from Stokesberry’s at Ballard FM)
• 2 slices ciabatta bread (trade from Alex the baker at Carnation FM)
• Salt & pepper

Crack 2 eggs into a small bowl.  Bring tomato to a simmer with herb sprig in a small saucepan.  When tomato boils, turn it down to maintain slow simmer.  Extract the herb sprig and then gently ease the eggs in.  Simmer for 3-5 minutes until eggs are cooked but yolks still soft. Place 2 slices of ciabatta bread in the bottom of your bowl.  Pour in the egg/tomato.  Sprinkle salt & pep.  EAT IT.  The bread soaks up the tomato and egg yolk for a mouthwatering mouthful.

If you’re catching a theme here, it is that Oxbow LOVES trading veggies for other goods when we work markets.  This is the great thing about being a producer in addition to a consumer. I get to eat exactly the way I want to eat: whole, real, best-quality foods straight from the farms.  I get to do this for basically free.  We grow our own veggies, so there are ample pick-your-own salads and roasted and sauteed veggie meals to be had.  Then when we hit our three weekly farmers markets, we get to trade our extra veggies for all kinds of other items.  We get to know the other vendors who we trade with on a weekly basis.  It is so fun to run around and trade with Aaron for Seabreeze’s milk and sausage, snag eggs from Stokesberry’s, cheese from Mt Townsend Creamery’s Annika,  smoked salmon from Tim at Wilson Fish, piles of bread from Farhad at Greatful Bread, honey, fruit, etc and etc.  I was hesitant about it at first, but people at these other booths are stoked to get our veggies in exchange for their products.  If someone wants to send me home with bacon or strawberries in exchange for arugula, why would I question that?!?  Alice says that this is the time of year when she basically stops going grocery shopping.  I’ll be buying in a few bulk staples and some 70% cacao dark chocolate, and I’m pretty much set to go !

As the Solstice approaches, we can feel the change in our farm even though the temperature has still been very up and down.  As spring turns finally to summer, the plants are increasing in size more rapidly and the tenor of the work is starting to turn more toward harvest and processing instead of planting.  The busy season is dawning.  Our first week of CSA shares are happening this week!  I got to help harvest and process and then deliver the very first shares to Ballard on Sunday!  What a great culmination to have folks come down on purpose to bring home their own veggie allotment!  300 area families will be eating vegetables from our farm boxes this summer.  It’s fun to think about that group of people and what they will all be doing with their garlic scapes, greens, and rhubarb this week.  Here’s what I did with mine:

Kale and White Bean Casserole

• 2 cups dry white beans (PCC)
• 1/2 lb sausage or ground pork – optional (Seabreeze)
• 1 bunch kale (Oxbow)
• 1 bunch garlic scapes (Oxbow)
• 3 cups fatty fatty chicken broth (Nature’s Last Stand chicken from last week)
• 1 cup Bread crumbs or crushed up chips  (I used corn chips Trader Joes)
• 1/2 cup chopped nuts  (I used almonds from Trader Joes)
• 1/2 cup grated parmesan cheese (Trader Joes)

The night before, soak the white beans in water.  Drain.  Cook them in the chicken broth with fresh or dry herbs (sage, thyme, and/or rosemary).  Chop up and sautee the sausage.  Add the garlic scapes and sautee.  Add the kale and sautee til cooked.  Season with salt, pepper, maybe a little vinegar.  Mix the beans & broth with the sauteed ingredients.  Pour it all into a baking dish.  Top with a mixture of the chips, almonds, and cheese.  Maybe dot with butter if you’re feeling crazy.  Bake at 350 for about 20 minutes until it gets bubbly!  Enjoy with lettuce salad.

At home at the yurt, our bunnies are also growing up quickly. 4 weeks old now, they are acting like real little rabbits, eating and drinking a TON, and are squirmy little handfuls to pick up.  We have just started pasturing them (putting them out on grass).  Alice did an excellent carpentry job on an old rabbit run we had inherited from farmer Luke, so they get to escape the confines of their hutches during the day and we put them back in with their Mamas overnight.  They are sooo happy eating grass and the piles and piles of lettuce scraps that we bring back from the barn!  I did rabbit “processing” (slaughter and butchering) with Noe in Seattle again last Saturday to get some more experience under my belt.  I feel moderately confident about it.  Our rabbit experience has not been perfect or without mistakes.  I want to make sure to point out that  everything has not gone swimmingly; in our learning we have fudged up a number of times.  We started out with 15 rabbit babies and are now down to 10 (kind of 11, as I will explain…).  Two died at birth.  One got out of the nest overnight when it was just a few days old and we found it dead the next morning – possibly from cold?  Last week we had our two unfortunate incidences.  One: a bunny escaped.  I left the door open for a second while I turned my back and a little guy got out of the hutch and trundled off into the woods!  To his/her credit, this little bunny has been living wild around the yurt for a week now, foiling all our attempts to catch him.  I see him almost every day, hanging around, enjoying life!  The second incident was more tragic: a bunny got through the hutch partition into the wrong side with the other Mom and the other Mom beat it up.  When Alice got home from work, the poor little one was on the wrong side, alive but severely lacerated on its haunch and underbelly.  I had no idea that Margie would have done such a thing; they are only separated from the others by a chickenwire divider so have been able to see and smell each other the whole time – but clearly having an intruder into her enclosure warranted her trying to kill the foreign baby.  The rabbit was severely enough wounded that the only thing for us to do was put it down.  I luckily knew how to do it because of my experience at Noe’s, so we did it quickly and properly and buried the bun behind the yurt.  I cried a bit as I did it, which was a different emotion from what I’d experienced during the planned slaughter at Noe’s.  It was sad and a wakeup call that this animal had to experience pain and die because of a mistake on our part that we had not made the two hutches isolated enough.  I feel strongly that we should not be taking these animals’ lives lightly because we know they are intended for food.  The whole point is that we want them to live the best possible lives under our care and then die quickly and painlessly.  It is a learning experience for Alice and me, but we need to be more careful.  I do still feel good about this experiment with raising our own meat.  We are getting into a good daily routine with the bunnies, and it will be a new experience when I cook and eat my own meat for the first time.  I don’t know if raising meat rabbits will be something I continue with or not, though.

To wrap up, here are a couple of pics – more on my Flickr as usual!

Tomato kisses are bluegreen and iridescent

Sonj and Jess on the transplanter with Adam. We did mechanical transplanting for the first time on broccoli and cauliflower!

Standard random farm meal: squash soup, wild rice, sauteed broccoli and kale, yogurt and croutons. All in the same bowl.

Margot and babes

Lovely spinach row - seeds are sprouting!

Micro & Macro: My garden on the farm.

It’s been two weeks since I last wrote!  In just two weeks, the corn that I had pictured in my last post has gone from dry seeds to germinated seeds to little sprouts in trays to little sprouts planted out in the field in front of my yurt.  Tracking time by watching plants grow is a great thing.

I was amazed at the 100% germination rate of both types of dry corn that I brought home from Betsey’s!  Those little corn kernels had been sitting patiently, waiting on their cobs for a couple of years (I think they were harvested in fall 2009), keeping intact their little germ of life that only wanted moisture and nutritious soil to spring into action.  They were pretty pumped to wake up in the Oxbow greenhouse.  They germinated in 6 days, and by the end of another week after that,  they were looking ready to transplant out.  This was the impetus I needed to get cracking on my garden.

I got a lesson on the walk-behind rototiller from Farmer Adam.  It was all levers: put this one in neutral, pull-start the motor, use this other one for first gear, reverse, engage the tiller, you’re set to go.  I yanked my shoulder uncomfortably a few times trying to emulate Adam on the pull-start, then I resorted to the two-hand method favored by those with less upper body strength and got it on the first try.  He showed me how to load the tiller up ramps into the back of the farm van!  I snagged a can of gas from the shed and headed out to the far field by the yurt.

An hour of slow-walking the tiller back and forth and I converted my 50′ x 30′  garden area from cloddy chunks into flat and springy with frothy, rich topsoil.  This tiny little area on the edge of the 3-acre squash field is where Alice and I are going to plant our personal crops.  She’s leaving in August for the allure of Michigan and a graduate program, so the garden is mostly mine for planning, planting and upkeep.  The planning had been piecemeal up til now, but now that the soil is ready I can’t stop thinking about things I want to put in it.  First are my 3 rows of corn.  80 transplants went in immediately after my tilling session on Memorial day, plus another 40 direct-seeded into the field just for comparison’s sake.  Then a row of sunflowers to brighten things up.

Next came my row of potatoes.  I got some seed potatoes from Betsey as well as the corn.   I’m going to grow a few of my favorite varieties from last year — I’m most excited about the Carlotta – Ohhh how yummy with its unique firm and waxy texture!  So different from any potato I’d had before!  I planted them using Betsey’s method: hand-dug a shallow ditch and scooped out little pockets at the bottom of the ditch to nestle the taters into.  One little row of 30 potato plants.  It might sound like a lot of plants to a home gardener, but it seems like a drop in the bucket to me considering that earlier the same week Sonja and I helped Adam plant forty-two 450-foot rows of potatoes.  Just thinking about it boggles my mind   We spent most of a day walking up and down the field behind the tractor, balancing buckets of seed potatoes against our bellies and the tractor’s implement.   In an alternating rythm, Sonja and I reached over and over into our buckets and tossed potatoes into the tractor’s wake, trying to get them to land as close as possible to a one-foot spacing all the way down the row.  It was like playing a video game or something – it required immense focus to keep a continual flow of potatoes at that speed, and accuracy to get them to land in the space that was being opened up by the tractor’s chevron, before the chasm closed up with the soil mounded over it by the discs being dragged behind.   Adam kept ramping up the speed on us so that as soon as we got good at it, we had to go faster!  He timed our rows and by the end we were knocking out that 450-feet in under 3 minutes.  Boom.

Anyway my little row of personal potatoes excites me because I am interested in saving my own seed and carrying on a few of Betsey’s time-tested varieties.  I will have more than enough potatoes to eat from Oxbow; I don’t need to grow my own potatoes to feed myself.  It’s more of an experiment and a way to generate more seed for the following year.  Similarly, I am putting a 30-foot row of cabbage in my personal garden.  This is my sauerkraut bed.  Oxbow will provide me with plenty of cabbage to eat, but I feel pretty pumped about having friends over for an enormous kraut-making extravaganza later in the season, and for this I feel I ought not raid the farm supply which will be intended to be sold at market.  So I’ll grow 60 or 70 heads of cabbage myself.  I think I will probably stick a few row-feet of carrots on the end of that bed, because I enjoyed the cabbage+carrot sauerkraut I made better than the plain cabbage one.

So there it is: corn, taters, and kraut.  Some lovely storage crops for my post-Oxbow winter.  Alice will be adding ground cherries and and bee-attracting flower mix as well.  I will sprinkle some statice flowers around the edges, and we’ve got ourselves a garden.  It will be a challenge over the next three months to maintain this little plot; I know from last year that things are about to ramp up into absolutely intensely crazy here for June, July and August, and it’s difficult to go home from a full 12 hour day of farming and even have time for dinner before bed, much less another session of hoe-weeding on the personal garden.  But it’ll happen.  Just keep thinking about that kraut !

Check out my May pictures on Flickr.  There’s a great feeling in the air right now… the farm is ripe with expectancy as the first of the crops that we planted back in April are suddenly ready for harvest – gorgeous ruffly butter lettuces and succulent, tender lacinato kale whom I knew when they were just babies in seedling trays are now being sold at market.  We just got the bulk of the warm-season crops transplanted out (zucchini, cukes, peppers, strawberries, beans) and before you know it those too will be pumping out their fruits for harvest and delivery to CSA customers and restaurant diners.  The tomato plants are thriving in their cozy hoophouses and I heard a rumor that this week we will be top-tying them for the first time, so I’ll be learning a new method of tomato cultivation to add to my farm skillset.  I’m really enjoying this second farm season as a way to solidify my knowledge & hone my instincts from last year, as well as to learn new & different ways of doing the same things.  Because this is a bigger operation, I’ll be learning a lot about efficiency, gaining speed and accuracy on tasks, and getting comfortable with equipment (drove the tractor for the first time today)!   Putting in my own garden made me realize that all this will potentially make it super easy to scale back to a more manageable single-person size operation when I want to.  Having done the 450-foot row tractor potato dealio will make it much less intimidating to put in a few rows of potatoes for my startup farm.

Woah, it is really time to end computer time for the night and hit the hay (I don’t actually sleep in hay, it’s just a euphemism )  I am happy to be here, grateful that I will be waking up tomorrow and spending another day on the farm, trying to relish the present while dreaming about good things in the future.

Planning ahead for the cornbread of the future.

I’m taking slow food to a whole new level. Want to eat some delicious cornbread? First, plant some corn.

I had asked Luke and Adam here at Oxbow for permission to grow a little garden.  “Since I’m from the midwest,” I said, “I’ve been feeling the urge to have a cornfield in my front yard. It’s okay for me to bring in some nice super-sweet, GMO, RoundupReady Monsanto corn, right? That way we can bring this hippie organic farm into the new millenium.”  Pause. “Ummm, haha, just kidding!  Actually it’s some saved seed of an heirloom dry corn that I want to grow so I can grind it for cornmeal. Can I till up a little area to grow a few stalks?”  The farmers breathe a sigh of relief  

“Sure,” they told me, “and in fact, you don’t even have to prep your own ground. Have this huge corner of the field we just tilled for squash planting. It’s extra, we were just going to leave it fallow, and it’s right in front of your yurt.”  Wow! Just a small instance of  the principle that if you decide what you want and make it known, all the pieces will fall into place.

Betsey had introduced us to skillet cornbread on the farm last year. It’s pretty special –  with buttermilk and butter in the recipe you can’t really go wrong but it’s the freshly-ground heirloom dry corn that makes it magical.  I shelled and ground a bunch before leaving Bainbridge and brought enough for a few batches out to Oxbow. Everyone I’ve made it for so far has kind of flipped out when they tasted it. Warm and chewy and with a grainy toothsome quality, sweet and salty and with a drizzle of honey… it’s pretty allright.

At this point I’m almost out of my cornmeal. Time to restock my stash — time to carry on the Betsey tradition and grow the stuff myself. I picked up some seed corn from Betsey last weekend: a couple ears of her Painted Mountain and some loose kernels of Roy’s Calais Flint. Two heirloom varieties with cool coloring patterns and interesting histories about where and how the varieties were developed.

As soon as I got the corn home I trundled it out to the greenhouse, put soil in a couple of 50-cell flats, and popped in 100 multicolored kernels.  There was something so viscerally satisfying about planting these seeds with the end goal very clearly in sight. There is something super exciting about the prospect of tending this corn, my very own crop in the midst of all the other farm crops that I’m helping with but by no means in charge of.  I read up on corn cultivation tips. It is a heavy nitrogen feeder, said google. Make sure you fertilize every couple of weeks. Am I going to have to go out and buy fertilizer? Anothrt google, this time on “rabbit manure”, turns up the info that bunny pellets are extremely nitrogenous and also are unusual in that they do not need to be composted before being used as fertilizer on the field. Boom. A complete system here in miniature, yurt-scale farming.

Here’s a picture of step one in my cornbread recipe. Stay tuned for updates and if you’re lucky you can help me enjoy a skilletfull sometime around the October timeframe!

1917.

Pretty right on.